Cell phones and smartphones, sometimes referred to generically as user equipment (UE), are ubiquitous in modern life. UEs can be used to check e-mail, place cellular- and internet-based calls, maintain calendars, and provide a myriad of other applications. As UEs have added capabilities, however, the amount of data consumed by the average UE has increased. In addition, the sheer number of UEs in use at a given time in a given location can be enormous, which can exceed the capacity of a local cell tower, or wireless base station (WBS). This can create delays, errors, and other problems that can negatively impact UE performance and user's perceived quality of experience (QoE), among other things.
At the cell edge—i.e., at a distance that is relatively close to the maximum transmission range for the WBS—this traffic problem can be exacerbated by retransmission traffic. If a UE near the cell edge does not properly receive a packet of data, the UE can request that the packet be resent from the WBS to the UE. In fourth-generation (4G) networks, for example, this resend can be achieved by sending a hybrid automatic repeat request, or HARQ request, from the UE to the WBS. And, because it is a retransmission—as opposed to an initial transmission—a HARQ is given high-priority in the scheduling scheme of the WBS. If enough HARQ requests are received at the WBS during a given period of time, however, this can result in physical resource block (PRB) “starvation,” causing delays for other UEs attempting to communicate with the WBS. Thus, even UEs close to the WBS and/or with strong signals may be unable to connect to the WBS or may experience errors.